All posts in category Estate Sales

This past April I went to the mega Gainesville FL Friends of the Library (FOL) sale. This is one of the largest and best known books sales in the country and they hold a couple sales per year. Here are some of the books I got. (each of the images below are clickable)

All three Abrahamic religions represented here:

… hmm Insect Diets?

The first book is Spagyrics: The Alchemical Preparation of Medicinal Essences, Tinctures, and Elixirs. The second book is There is No Death & There Are No Dead: Evidence of Survival and Spirit Communication through the Voice and Images from Those on the Other Side. The fourth book is The Symbolic Prophecy of the Great Pyramid.

I read most of this book which was published in 1988. It which highlights the housing and building architecture of the new African-American settlers in Liberia. The buildings borrowed much from the American South where they came from. Lot of the blacks arrived just after slavery ended though some arrived as freed men in the early 19th century. These blacks decided to build better lives for themselves (or so they hoped) and escape white rule in America. Though many were disappointed at the conditions in Liberia, some staked out a reasonable life. The new settlers ruled the country until the coup in 1980. The country has been in chaos ever since.

These all below came from an estate sale in Deland. Morals and Dogma is a Freemasonry book. Albion’s Seed explains the four geographical areas of England where early British Americans originated from. And The Underground History of American Education was written by John Taylor Gatto. He is well known for exposing government schooling.

Here are some of my estate sale finds over the past couple of months. Below are some of the books I purchased. The three volume set of Works of Josephus dates from the late 19th century:

I picked up Human Action, The Protocols, Psychiatry and the CIA, and about 10 issues of World Order magazine from another sale. The World Order magazines date from the 1970s and are tough to find:

Below starting from the left is one of the earliest American printing of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. It was published in 1949. The two books next to it are Easton Press leather bound books of the same title and Brave New World. The brown book next to it is the first edition of Brave New World, published in 1932. The two paperback books at the end date from the 1970s and are not worth much.

Recently, I came across an entire library of occult books at a local estate sale. I have never seen such as collection. The books above are the ones I purchased and were only a small portion of what he had. I got to the sale late and there were already a couple of book dealers there and no doubt they got some of the best stuff. The previous owner had thousands of books, with many of them dealing with occult aspects Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and several smaller sects. There were quite a few books on Jung, psychology, dreams, and alchemy. I spent about four hours at that sale digging through the stuff.

This estate sale was not a recent one but one I attended back in June of last year. As I’ve written in an earlier post, I attend estate sales regularly. The above books were from an estate of a WWII buff. When I arrived at the sale, which was about three hours after the start time, there were few people there and it didn’t appear that any of the books had sold. The sale was by appointment only. I had little idea about what I was about to embark upon. The estate ended up being among the most interesting I’ve ever been to. There were about 200 WWII books – nearly all of them high in quality and fairly recently printed. A lot of books were from Schiffer Military History Press and JJ Federowicz Publishing Co. The owner was a middle class man and had a lot of obsession with Hitler. I was told he traveled to Germany seven times, evidently for the WWII sites. Another 200 or so books were bibles (many of them leather bound and still in boxes) and bible commentaries. Though Christian material is common here in the Bible Belt, this is still a lot for this part of the country.

It is a hobby of mine to visit estate sales every weekend. Although, I don’t keep track, I probably attended around 400 sales in my area during the past two years. Last weekend, I came across a library of conspiracy books. This included five books by David Icke, one book and five DVDs by Alex Jones, two books by Mark Dice, and a slew of others such as by Carroll Quigley, Edward Griffin, and Charlotte Iserbyt. To come across even one or two of those types of books at a sale is unusual, but to come across a collection this extensive is something I’ve never seen before. There were quite a few books on survival and prepping as well.